Today, due to recent terrorist activities, there is a great concern that terrorists may place explosives, weapons of mass destruction, or other harmful materials in cargo containers that are employed by the cargo transportation industry to ship goods in, for instance, transoceanic commerce. Some vendors have developed non-intrusive inspection systems for such cargo containers that are based upon technology employed in airport baggage scanning systems. Unfortunately, such non-intrusive inspection systems suffer from many difficulties, including that many of the systems do not produce multiple views of the objects present in a cargo container from multiple directions. Further, many of the systems do not provide for the discrimination or identification of materials found in objects present in a cargo container, thereby making the detection of explosives, weapons of mass destruction, or other harmful materials extremely difficult for such systems.
Therefore, there exists in the industry, a need for non-intrusive inspection systems, including apparatuses and methods, for non-intrusively inspecting cargo containers that enable viewing of the contents of such cargo containers in multiple views or planes, enable the discrimination and identification of the materials of objects present in the cargo containers, and that addresses these and other problems or difficulties which exist now or in the future.